Dienekes links to a new article that examines the male and female lineages of Lithuanians in relation to their neighbors.
– Estonians speak a Finno-Ugric language (close to Finnish).
– Latvians speak an Indo-European language of the same sub-family as Lithuanian, Baltic.
– Russias speak an Indo-European language of the Slavic sub-family (there has been debate about whether affinities between Baltic and Slavic languages is due to geographic proximity, ergo, cultural exchange, or common ancestry. Some linguists suggest a “Balto-Slavic” group, indicating affinity).
The abstract suggests that Lithuanians are genetically more variant from their neighbors on the Y lineage. This makes sense if you assume patrilocality. But, the finding (again) is that their Y lineages seem closer to those of Latvians than Slavs (not a big surprise) and Estonians (ergo, Finns), even though the latter are non-Indo-European speakers. One can spin many hypotheses from this data, but it just seems this is a case where genetics muddles more than informs. You have to take a step back and look toward analogs in other regions. If more and more studies like this come out, you would think that ideas about an Indo-European genetic expansion would die down, but then you hear about the M17 marker that many Indo-Aryan South Asians carry that might indicate a distant relationship to Eastern European peoples. The fact that another Indo-European people, the Welsh, have Y lineages that resemble Basques (pre-Indo-European speakers) more than many English, though again, the mtDNA (female line) is much less variant, suggests that cultural transmission was important (as archeologists love to claim). If the camp who argue that arguments for a dominant exoganous Y line in India are wrong are validated over time, that will fit the pattern (cultural transmission). Wel’ll see….
Here is my own muddled speculation on this topic (Lithuanians) from a few years back.
Posted by razib at 02:13 AM